Computing, archiving, digital media, and a bit of historical speculation

Tuesday, 4 February 2014

Mavericks

Back in October 2013 Apple released a new, free, upgrade to OS X. Officially OS X 10.9 it was more commonly referred to by its code name Mavericks.

Well, I’ve been in this game long enough to know that you don’t go and upgrade operating systems on day one, especially if you use a lot of third party products.

In my case I’d say that the main products in question were

Microsoft Office

Libre Office

Text Wrangler

Evernote

Chrome

Wunderlist

Virtualbox

Dropbox

So I did nothing. Five or six months later OS X 10.9 had had its first global update and an application - Wunderlist - started complaining that I needed to move to a later OS to run the latest version.

So I reckoned it was time to migrate - my work machine at least. I thought I’d leave the home machine, which is getting on for five years old now for the moment in case of performance problems. (While it’s on 10.6.8, just like my work machine, it has a slower cpu and only 2GB of memory. I reckoned if my work machine was slow or bad after the upgrade, chances are that the old iMac would be doubly so).

So one morning when I had things to do that I could equally do on my Linux laptop I opened up the App store and clicked on the option to upgrade to Mavericks.

The whole download and install process took a couple of hours but was very smooth - a couple of passwords and we were away. At the end of the process it also decided I needed to upgrade the EFi Bios on the laptop and that took an extra ten minutes, but basically the upgrade just worked.

In use the machine seems a little slower than previously - Chrome and Evernote - both of which used to pause occasionally - seem to pause a little more but general responsiveness is about the same.

Everything else seems to work. I have this bad habit of leaving applications open and never closing anything and I have this feeling that I can’t load things up with quite the abandon I used to, which alone with the Chrome and Evernote pauses might be a suggestion that I would benefit from a little more memory, but the machine is by no means slow in use.

Yhe only thing I found really irritating about the upgrade was that somewhere in the process they changed the direction of scroll on my external mouse, perhaps to make it a little more iPad like - the solution was simple, into settings and unlick natural for the scroll settings.

Otherwise it’s fine. I’m still debating over upgrading the old home machine though given the possible memory requirements …

About Me

Been an IT professional, a field ecologist and tried my hand at research in psychology. Now retired, I'm a blogger, twitterer, traveller, pontificator and classical and early medieval history geek - I'm also known to enjoy a decent pinot noir, and late night conversations about central Asia, the Russian Revolution and just about anything else.
Some claim I know too much about some things, some that I know too little.